that each idol was
in itself held to be a living god. In India food is offered to the
idol, it goes through its ablutions, is fanned, and so on, exactly
like a human king. The ideas of sanctuary and sacrilege appear to
depend primarily on the belief in the actual presence of the god
in his shrine. And in India no sanctity at all attaches to a temple
from which the idol has been removed. Thus we see the life of the god
distributed over a multitude of personalities. Again, the same god,
as Vishnu or the sun, is held to have had a number of incarnations,
as the boar, the tortoise, a man-lion, a dwarf, Rama and Krishna,
and these are venerated simultaneously as distinct deities. The
whole Brahman caste considered itself divine or as partaking in the
life of the god, the original reason for this perhaps being that
the Brahmans obtained the exclusive right to perform sacrifices,
and hence the life of the sacrificial animal or food passed to
them, as in other societies it passed to the king who performed the
sacrifice. A Brahman further holds that the five gods, Indra, Brahma,
Siva, Vishnu and Ganesh, are present in different parts of his body,
[142] and here again the life of the god is seen to be divided into
innumerable fragments. The priests of the Vallabhacharya sect, the
Gokulastha Gosains, were all held to be possessed by the god Krishna,
so that it was esteemed a high privilege to perform the most menial
offices for them, because to touch them was equivalent to touching
the god, and perhaps assimilating by contact a fragment of his divine
life and nature. [143] The belief in a common life would also explain
the veneration of domestic animals and the prohibition against killing
them, because to kill one would injure the whole life of the species,
from which the tribe drew its subsistence. Similarly in a number of
cases the first idea of seasonal fasts is that the people abstain
from the grain or fruit which is growing or sown in the ground. Thus
in India during the rains the vegetables growing at this period are
not eaten, and are again partaken of for the first time after the
sacrificial offering of the new crop. This rule could not possibly be
observed in the case of grain, but instead certain single fast-days are
prescribed, and on these days no cultivated grain or fruit, but only
those growing wild, should be eaten. These rules seem to indicate that
the original motive of the fast was to avoid injuring the common li